The weblog of Norman Geras

January 29, 2013

Figures from a dark time XVI

Some people think that too much attention has been given to the Holocaust. Me, I'm with Angela Merkel when she asserts, 'We must clearly say, to generation after generation, and say it again: with courage, each individual can help ensure that racism and anti-Semitism have no chance'.

For nearly 70 years, Harry Grenville and his sister Hannah, who were Jewish refugees, wondered what dreadful fate had befallen the parents they had to leave behind in Nazi Germany.

The siblings were evacuated on one of the last Kindertransports allowed to leave the country before the outbreak of the Second World War. They came to England, where they found a home with a foster family in Cornwall.

After the war, they tried without success to discover what had become of their parents but every record had been destroyed. Then last week, out of the blue, came the confirmation that the pair had been seeking all their lives.

A Polish visitor to the Auschwitz museum photographed a vast pile of suitcases left by victims murdered in the Holocaust. Each had a name and serial number painted in white letters on the front. The visitor decided to try to trace surviving relatives - and tracked down Mr Grenville, 87, to Dorchester, Dorset.

Mr Grenville and his sister were among more than 10,000 Jewish children allowed to leave Germany before the war. After their departure, their parents and grandmother were sent to an internment camp. During the early years of the war the children received brief messages from their parents relayed by the Red Cross. In 1944, a final message informed them that their parents were being moved to another camp further "east". Mr Grenville now knows their final destination.

By March 1944 the ghetto population had fallen to just 300 people and it was closed.

Those who remained were marched to the railway station and, on packed "cattle trucks", taken to Majdanek, near Lublin, Bryer's first concentration camp.

After being ordered to strip and stand naked in the snow, she and the others were given "a striped uniform, a striped dress and a white handkerchief on the head - and that was all you had in this winter". She spent her 17th birthday in the camp.

After six weeks the family were moved again, with Bryer sent to Plaszow, near Krakow - the concentration camp portrayed in Schindler's List.

Life there was brutal, with the prisoners divided into work teams and forced to push wagons full of stones, laden from the quarry.

"It was a hell of a job, we could hardly manage. There were shootings and hangings and there was no crematorium there - only a hill where they used to burn the people and all the ashes used to fly over us."

Another danger was the demand for blood for German troops fighting in Russia, which was forcibly taken and difficult to recover from.

It was at Plaszow that her father, an "upright" man who no longer knew where his wife or children were, was beaten to death by a guard.

"On April 18th, 1944... there was a knock on the door. They said, 'Pack up your possessions, tomorrow we're coming to pick you up,'" said Edita, her voice quavering with emotion.

"We said, 'but where are we going?' They said, 'it's nothing, it's a work camp.' So we thought we were going off to work and were waiting outside the house the next morning," she continued.

"They took us to the Pushkin synagogue. You can't imagine the scenes there - people crying, shouting, children, the sick - all crammed into the synagogue. We survived the night, and the next day, Sunday morning, we were marched down to the brick factory."

Kosice's brick factory had been transformed into a concentration camp for 14,000 Jews from the city and surrounding villages. From there Edita, her sister, parents and several relatives were loaded onto cattle wagons bound for Auschwitz.

"We travelled for three days. The train kept stopping at various stations, and each time they would want something from us. First it was gold, then it was furs, then ladies' underwear. Each time something,"...

"Finally, in the early hours of the morning, we arrived at Auschwitz. We were ordered out - men in one line, women another. That was the last time we ever saw our parents...